Makeup heartache is dropping a week’s worth of wages at MECCA and still leaving the house looking more like the bad side of coffee and less like a Parisian it-girl. As it turns out, an expensive foundation and a red lip are not all it takes to look the part. It’s more about those all important steps many of us miss…

When it comes to matters of beauty, we know that an application of the right wand can take you from tired and given up to slightly undone ‘it girl’ status almost instantaneously. We liken it to the fairy godmother of the makeup bag, you know the kind that will turn your pumpkin into a carriage or your tired eyes into your best feature. Naturally we had to know the wands doing the rounds with our favourite makeup experts.

With 2017 all about rocking our best skin and beauty, we have been dying to invest a little TLC into our lips. You know something to help us rock those Bella lips sans the injections and high probability of pout trout. So we turned to makeup maven and the host of her own ET makeover show, Misty Fox for a little lip action.

So what is a girl to do when she is told to put down her arsenal but there are eye bags to cover, fine lines to fill and a dull complexion to bring to life? Turn to Melanie Grant of course, because for the LOVE TWAIN reader, only the best will do.

Molly Warkentin seeks to illuminate rather than disguise the originality of each face she paints, emphasizing her client’s natural beauty to create looks which are both mesmerizing and keep the integrity of the skin. Naturally, we asked Molly to share her concealer ‘how to’ guide, because our approach is anything but natural…

While we would all love to rock a bold red lip, truth be told, we can’t have it all and wear it all. Like all good things in life, there is no one fits all criteria so we turned to Revlon Makeup Director for Australasia, Melanie Burnicle to talk us through the best lipstick shades based on hair colour.

Lipsticks. It used to be as easy as stealing our mum’s favourite red rouge and painting the town red but then reality set in and before we knew it, approaching the makeup counter turned into going down a rabbit hole. In a quest to add some good old fun back into picking the right shade TWAIN paid a visit to The Lip Lab, Sydney…

Australia’s freshly crowned L’Oreal Paris Makeup Director, Tobi Henney, takes us behind the scenes for the March cover of L’Official Manila. The talent, our very own muse Margaret Zhang, with a look that is anything but basic and now in reach for you to recreate at home.